![]() Bannister completed the third lap in 3:00.7 and needed to post a 59-second final lap to make history. “Faster!” Bannister commanded his pacemaker, who ignored the order and kept his steady gait as they completed the first lap of the quarter-mile oval in 57.5 seconds and reached the halfway point in 1:58.Ĭhataway now took to the lead, but the pace slowed. Bannister glided effortlessly behind into his slipstream and noticed that his legs “seemed to meet no resistance at all, as if propelled by some unknown force.” Everything appeared to move in slow motion, including Brasher. Fretting that the wind could revive at any moment, Bannister prepared to begin again. Brasher, however, was called for a false start. Bannister took a quick glance at the flag, which still fluttered gently. As the starter raised his gun, the 1,500 spectators bundled in overcoats and scarves shuttered their mouths in silence and focused their eyes on the 6-foot-2-inch Brit. His running spikes, which he had personally sharpened on a grindstone in a hospital laboratory earlier in the day, dug into the cinder track. Bannister toed the starting line with his fellow racers. Sensing a lull, he told them, “Right, we’ll go for it.”Īt 6 p.m. Bannister looked up and saw the English flag slacken. Bannister continually waffled as to whether he should even attempt to race until his impatient pacemakers demanded an answer shortly before the race. If the wind remained steady, it would slow him down by 1 second per lap, meaning he would in actuality have to run a 3:56 mile. Bannister grew dismayed as he looked at the wind-whipped English flag stretched out horizontally from a nearby church steeple. Although back at his alma mater, he donned the uniform of the Amateur Athletic Association, which would be competing against Oxford University in the meet. The wind and weather, however, were variables outside his control.īannister arrived at the track late in the afternoon. Through intense interval training of running 10 laps with 2-minute breaks in between, Bannister had dropped his average quarter-mile splits from 63 seconds to 59 seconds, sufficient to break the elusive barrier.īannister identified four essential requirements for running a sub-4-minute mile: “a good track, absence of wind, warm weather and even-paced running.” He knew he would be on solid footing on the Oxford track where he had raced many times as a university undergraduate, and he had two excellent pacesetters in training partners Chris Brasher and Chris Chataway. By measuring his oxygen consumption, Bannister discovered that running consistent lap times required less oxygen than running variable times, so he focused on running steady quarter-mile splits. Stung by the disappointment of his fourth-place finish, Bannister sought national atonement by doing something no man had ever done-running a mile in less than 4 minutes.īannister’s medical training restricted his track time to 45 minutes daily, but it gave him a knowledge of physiology that no other runner who flirted with breaking the 4-minute barrier had. ![]() Although the amateur broke an Olympic record in the finals, so did the runners who captured gold, silver and bronze directly in front of him. ![]() The lanky Bannister had been favored to win the 1,500-meter race at the 1952 Summer Olympics in Helsinki. Showers and sun bathed the rattling train as it carried Britain’s top middle-distance runner to his first track meet of the season and a chance at redemption. With one eye on the changing skies and the other on history, Bannister boarded a train to Oxford after completing his rounds at St. From the moment he had left his London flat that morning, the 25-year-old medical student had obsessed about the wind. Roger Bannister wavered like the notoriously fickle English weather with every hard gust that blew across Oxford’s Iffley Road track on the evening of May 6, 1954. ![]()
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